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Expect six hours of downtime tonight as the balance patch is applied.
While the first big update for Lost Ark is due later this month, a lot of conversation among players has been about the announcement that the next weekly update would rebalance some tier 1 and tier 2 endgame activities—several of its Abyssal Dungeons and Guardian Raids are being nerfed. Hardcore players wailed their game was being ruined for the sake of casuals, though there were also plenty of players pointing out that Guardian Raids in particular—activities intended to be repeated daily—don’t need to be quite as drawn-out as they currently are.
As well as detailing the changes in full, the latest blog post explains more of the reasoning behind the rebalance. «In other regions,» it says, «players had to stay in Tier 1 and 2 for a considerable duration, as Tier 3 had not yet been released. With the amount of time spent in these stages of the game, players had a long time to study the patterns and mechanics of the Guardians and Demons they encountered— leaving only a few monsters that ended up posing as challenging hurdles for them.»
Meanwhile, the western version of Lost Ark launched with three tiers of endgame activities. Rather than being the be-all-and-end-all, the first two tiers of our version were intended to be a gentle ramp-up into what follows. But that’s not how they were working.
«With the different purpose of Tier 1 and Tier 2 in our regions,» the post continues, «there were some overly difficult Guardians and Abyssal Dungeon encounters left behind. This balance update isn’t about simply adjusting the difficulty as [a] whole. Rather, the focus is to improve some of the difficult patterns to better prepare players as they progress through each Tier and work their way toward Tier 3 endgame content.»
The actual updates aren’t nearly as cataclysmic as some were predicting. Many of them simply tweak the amount of damage caused by specific attacks or alter attack patterns rather than being sweeping changes. Here they are:
ANCIENT ELVERIA
PHANTOM PALACE
GATE OF PARADISE
Nacrasena
Flame Fox Yoho
Tytalos
Achates
Lava Chromanium
Levanos
Alberhastic
The update will also include several bugfixes and some improvements to how matchmaking works. It’s going live tonight, meaning an expected downtime of six hours will begin at 10pm PST / 5pm AEST / 6am UTC.
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was published in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did play every Warhammer videogame.
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